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Show theScenes t - y I ' f ".Of" mi -. 1 i , ' ,K t i i In January 1965, Time magazine ran a cover story on 'Today's Teenagers.' The article focused on Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and forecast that the bright, affluent children of the mid-1960s would go on to a dazzling future. Michael Medved and David Wallechlnsky investigated in-vestigated "the dazzling futures" of the "bright, affluent children" in their best-selling book 'WHAT REALLY HAPPENED HAP-PENED TO THE CLASS OF '65,' the basis of the NBC-TV anthology series ot the same title (Thursdays). Medved and Wallechinsky were themselves part of Palisades High's class of '65. Medved was the class' 'Most Intellectual' who had a reputation as a troublemaker. In his junior year he won the contempt of his classmates with his colorful campaign to turn the football foot-ball field into a rice paddy. Medved is shown in photo In 1965 and at his 10-year class reunion. Wallechinsky was a notorious underachiever whose major accomplishment in high school was Inventing a non-existent student named Sid Flnster. He won Sid excellent ex-cellent grades in several classes and got his name placed on official records. The two authors have been friends since high school and one night in 1975, they talked nearly all night about the strange stories and gossip they had heard about their classmates. "We both had thought about working on a project about our high school class Independently and that night, due to the enormous research job we realized was in front of us, we became a team," Medved said. They wrote an outline and sent it to their agent, David Obst, also the agent for famous Watergate scandal reporters re-porters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Obst helped them secure a contract from Random House which gave them funds and time necessary to do the book. Wallechinsky said, "There were 504 graduates In our class. We finally contacted about 350 people but many of their stories were similar. There were more than 90 housewives and 40-some lawyers. We tried to select 30 people who showed a solid cross-section of the different directions the people In the class had gone. We also focused on people who played different roles in the school from the ordinary invisible kid to the class clown, class bad girl, athletic stars, etc." This is essentially the point of the NBC series 'What Really Happened to the Class of '65.' Characters and stories depicted are not taken directly from Medved and Wallechinsky's book but are descriptive of the types of persons who attended high school during the '60s anywhere. Pleane check loot nutlon lor exact air tlm. j |